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Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.

Paul Valery

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Paul Valery
Age: 73 †
Born: 1871
Born: October 30
Died: 1945
Died: July 20
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Philosopher
Poet
Professor
Writer
Cette
Paul Ambroise Valéry
Paul Ambroise Valery
Paul-Ambroise Valéry
Paul Valery
Paul-Ambroise Valery
Enemy
Fire
Animal
Humidity
Books
Enemies
Book
Weather
People
Content
Animals

More quotes by Paul Valery

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The great virtues of the German people have created more evils than idleness ever did vices
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No work of art is ever completed, it is only abandoned.
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The mere notion of photography, when we introduce it into our meditation on the genesis of historical knowledge and its true value, suggests the simple question: Could such and such a fact, as it is narrated here, have been photographed?
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There are two ways to aquire the niceties of life: 1) To produce them or 2) To plunder them. When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.
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That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.
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The universe is built on a plan the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect.
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A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.
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A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator.
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Collect all the facts that can be collected about the life of Racine and you will never learn from them the art of his verse. All criticism is dominated by the outworn theory that the man is the cause of the work as in the eyes of the law the criminal is the cause of the crime. Far rather are they both the effects.
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Cognition reigns but does not rule.
Paul Valery
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Everything changes but the avant-garde.
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Liberty is the hardest test that one can inflict on a people. To know how to be free is not given equally to all men and all nations.
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What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.
Paul Valery
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War: a massacre of people who don't know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don't massacre each other.
Paul Valery
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History is the most dangerous product evolved from the chemistry of the intellect. ...History will justify anything. It teaches precisely nothing, for it contains everything and furnishes examples of everything.
Paul Valery
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Oh, hasten not this loving act, Rapture where self and not-self meet: My life has been the awaiting you, Your footfall was my own heart's beat.
Paul Valery
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The dog has made man their God, if the dog was an atheist, it would be perfect.
Paul Valery
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If what has happened in the one person were communicated directly to the other, all art would collapse, all the effects of art would disappear.
Paul Valery
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What is simple is false and what is not is useless.
Paul Valery
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The most ridiculous were those who, on their own authority, made themselves the judges and justices of the tribe. They seemed never to suspect that our judgments judge us, and that nothing exposes our weaknesses and reveals ourselves more naively than the attitude of pronouncing upon our neighbors.
Paul Valery